Sunday, March 30, 2014

There is much in the world to offend men and God. Angels too. And wimps. And Feminists. And lefties of all shades, especially homosexuals who may be left or middling but rarely right. And people of colour, except if that colour is pink. Pink people are Universally offensive and cannot be offended.Yes the world is a difficult place and there is much wrong with it.You might think, as the folk who frequent the Tavern do, that much crime, entertainment and politics is offensive.

There are laws and punishment for one but the other two reign unfettered. There are some ideas that are quite offensive, as well as being wrong. Mind you, much of what passes as thought offends a clear thinker.Much of it we cannot do much about without causing offence in turn.Offence and being offended is part of the human condition.But just as with politics and entertainment it is not essential for something to be illegal to cause offence. Take the Tattooed chest above. It was deemed 'offensive' by some woman who complained to Facebook where it had been posted; and Facebook took it down.We are expected to 'like' the decision to remove it. A woman didn't like it and so we have to like the prohibition. The person who posted it up had a reason but that was ignored. We have to 'approve' the decision that it was offensive.

BUT I do not want to approve.

I do NOT want to be implicated in the decisions of other people, particularly on matters of which I strongly disapprove.Neither does Kevin Williamson who dropped by for a pint. He points out where it gets far worse. And he stresses the 'progressive' strategy of implicating us all in their anti-human aims.Laws are being passed and taxes are being levied to force changes to our society that are destructive.

The Right Not to Be Implicated

“Everything not forbidden is compulsory,” or will be soon enough under our “liberal” regime.

The Left would not have it that way: Homosexual behaviour is not to be (just) tolerated, or homosexual unions recognized under law — rather, homosexuality is to constitute a special class of blessedness, and the failure to celebrate it is to be a sin, which in the liberal mind must be identical to a crime.

It is not enough for religious conservatives, such as the ones who own Hobby Lobby, to tolerate the legal sale and use of things such as the so-called morning-after pill — rather, they are expected to provide them at their own expense.

Abortions are not (just) to be legal, but legal and funded by the general community, with those funds extracted at gunpoint if necessary.

This is not merely, or even mainly, a question of economics. A monthly dose of emergency contraception (which seems like a lot) paid entirely out-of-pocket would run less than the typical cell-phone bill.

One does not suspect that Americans would find it very difficult to locate gay-friendly firms in the wedding-planning business. The typical first-trimester abortion costs less than an entry-level iPad — hardly an insurmountable economic barrier for a procedure that is, if we take the pro-choice side at their word, absolutely fundamental to a woman’s health and happiness.

The economics are incidental. The point is not to ensure that we all pay, but that we are all involved.

The Left may be morally illiterate,

but it is not blind.

The effects of the pathologically delusional tendency that once styled itself “the sexual revolution” are everywhere to be seen. In the 1960s and 1970s, our cultural discourse was dominated by the benefits side of that revolution’s ledger; since then, we’ve had sufficient time to have a good long look at the cost side, too, and the tradeoffs are more severe than our bell-bottomed Aquarian prophets had predicted.

It reads like an Old Testament genealogy:

Sexual chaos begat family chaos,

family chaos begat social chaos,

social chaos begat economic chaos,

economic chaos begat political chaos.

And so the generations unfold.

The relevant political reality is that those costs and benefits are not distributed equally: The benefits of license accrue mainly to the well-off and educated, who have the resources to make the most of their enjoyment of them;

the costs accrue mainly to the poor, who cannot afford to live, economically or morally, beyond their means.

Kate Moss can afford to be a single mother in her $20 million London townhouse. Not everybody can. Our so-called liberals find themselves in the queasy position of having created a moral culture that has destroyed millions of lives and many communities among the very disadvantaged people they claim to care most about, but they areincapable of criticizing a culture of license that none of them can imagine living without, even if they themselves are square as houses in their sexual habits.

The result of that is, if not guilt, at least a nagging awareness that this all turns out to be a great deal more morally complex than our liberationist-latitudinarian forebears had imagined.

The way to assuage the collective liberal conscience is to institutionalize and normalize liberal social preferences:

There is nobody to be blamed for social anarchy if that’s just the way things are. And if everybody is involved — as taxpayers or as employers providing health insurance — then everybody is implicated.

They are a little like those addicts who are uncomfortable in the social presence of abstainers, taking that abstention as a rebuke, whether it is intended as one or not.

In the United Kingdom, the government-run hospitals are burning the corpses of aborted children for heat,

and we are all expected to get cozy by the fire.

Now, I don't know about you but such a practice not only offends me but disgustsme.It very likely offends millions of taxpayers in Britain too. But the taxpayer is obliged to fund it !!

The Hobby Lobby case is in part about private property and whether we are to have it. If we hold capital only at the sufferance of the politico-sexual whims of those who hold power, then we do not really hold capital at all — we only rent property from our rulers, serfs in the world’s most sophisticated fiefdom. The property right is the fundamental right upon which all other political rights have their foundation.

But there is a separate question —

the right of conscience,

which is, at minimum, the right not to be implicated, to at least stand apart from that which is no longer forbidden but is not yet, as of Tuesday morning, compulsory.

The consciences of many people are as stunted as those of the left persuasion in Oz. They want us all to be just as weasely as they are.That Tattoo.I don't know who might laud the artistic merits or even take issue with them, but the woman in question was 'offended' by it and complained and therefore HAD to be upheld. And we had to agree. By Order of Facebook.But the tattoo which was painfully etched onto some lady's chest was as a suggestion for another woman who had had a mastectomy.It was a suggestion for courageous and honourable way of overcoming the pain and distress of losing a key aspect of such a sad lady's feminine self. Such body art can disguise physical scars. A 'cosmetic'.Its intent was to help heal emotional scars.

Not that such mattered a jot to the weasel woman who complained.

Nor to the weasels at Facebook who acquiesced to her ridiculous complaint. She was a woman, after all.There is a Biblical advice that encourages a means to stop taking offence.

"If your eye offends you, pluck it out".

I doubt the lady whose eyes took offence where none was made will be doing that any day soon. Perhaps a mascara product can be found.The issue is one of Freedom of Speech.The Hilary Village of Oz is currently haggling over just what the Government can forbid you and I to say. It is focused on the issue of people saying offensive things. You know the sort of thing.... "How come you are black when there is a hand-out but your face is white?" Or "I am offended by that tattoo". Suddenly in Oz a whole bunch of white people claim to be black and get offended and Andrew Bolt gets his opinions squashed out of existence, by Court Order. Facebook hastily takes down a tattoo picture.The difference is only of Degree.Between them are many other matters of great importance.

Senator the Hon. Scott Ryan had a few things to say about free speech. The Catellaxy corner lads told us:

Senator RYAN (Victoria—Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Education) (16:30): I have said before that I am a first amendment type of guy. I have long admired the American culture that values freedom of speech as a critical, non-negotiable and—I think even more importantly—virtually un-conditional component of a free society. Senator Wong talks about people being attacked. I should probably declare at this point that I am a longstanding member and a former research fellow of the Institute of Public Affairs. What we have heard from the other side of this chamber—and from my good friend, Senator Cameron, who has just left—over and over again is the vilification of people merely by virtue of the institute at which they work. There is a reason why the Greens and the ALP hate the Institute of Public Affairs—it is because it is not part of their public sector mentality. It challenges the precepts that they put up, and it cannot be bowed by the fact that it is not on the public sector drip, the way they wish all civil society was.

What we have just heard from Senator Wong and what we have heard constantly from those opposite, including the Greens,

relies on a profound misunderstanding of what our society is.

They seem to view our rights, particularly our right to speech and our right to discuss—our right to participate in democracy and in a free flow of ideas—as coming to us via a licence from politicians or judges.

They seem to think that, somehow, the laws in this place determine what we are allowed and not allowed to say.

That is a profound misrepresentation of our constitutional and legal history.

It is only in recent times that there have been such limits on things like speech. This is a profound fissure in what we view as the role of the state, and what we view as the role of the government and its relationship with the citizens of this country.

Senator Wong accused Senator Brandis of celebrating the rights of bigots. What I will say is that I condemn the bigot, but I celebrate the rights of every citizen. And that is important, because a commitment to freedom of speech only really counts when it is tested.

A commitment to freedom of speech only really counts when it comes to defending something you profoundly and viscerally disagree with—and that is where my commitment to free speech lies.

It is not about the public funding of artists.

I do not have to fund someone to support their right to say something.

There is a profound difference between the allocation of taxpayers' resources to give someone the right to do something, and the question of whether or not they are allowed to say something.

THIS is a crucial statement.

I will defend the right of someone to speak, but that does not entail and should not be confused with the idea that I should resource them to speak.

We have heard the constant complaints of those opposite over the last 48 hours about ethnic community leaders, multicultural community leaders, and their views on this particular proposal. I said at the start that I was a first amendment type of person: I view the proposal put up by the government and Senator Brandis in the exposure draft as a compromise. I accept that my views are not typical of all those in this place, or indeed all those in this country, in supporting a very strong and almost unlimited commitment to freedom of speech.

The problem I have is that those opposite seem to see us as a nation of tribes; as a nation where self-declared leaders of communities—communities defined by race—should somehow should have a special place in the consideration of legislation that any other Australian citizen should not.

Every Australian's view has an equal standing in this place—every Australian's view, no matter what community they declare themselves to be from; whether it be one or many; and whether or not they declare themselves to be leaders of communities.

The elected bodies in this country are the elected representatives of the Australian people. We don't believe in a corporatist society, or in one where there are a series of tribes where, somehow, some people have more rights than others.

The ALP and the Greens seek to define this as a debate about racism when it is not.

It is a debate profoundly about speech, its limits, and the role of governments, politicians and judges in limiting the rights of our fellow citizens to express ideas.

How is it our role to empower certain people in Australia, in this case judges under the current law, to determine whether another opinion is arrived at or expressed in good faith?

That is the current provision in section 18D of the Racial Discrimination Act. What happened to Andrew Bolt was that a court said that his opinion was not expressed in good faith. It did not just ban the expression of that opinion; it banned its re-publication.

It had to declare an Orwellian moment—that it never happened.

The point being that, of all those in this place, it was once the centre and the left of Australian politics who campaigned against censorship, yet it is the left of Australian politics who are now its greatest advocates.

Those opposite are confused between legality and licence.

To not make activities illegal is not to approve of them. The great problem with speech being banned is it denies people—community leaders, as Senator Wong pointed out, and people like me, you, and others in this chamber; it denies us the opportunity to repudiate.

Some speech should be repudiated. Some speech should be humiliated. Some speech should be ridiculed. But by banning it, it goes underground. In this technological world, where we cannot control the sources of news, that threat is even greater than when these laws were first passed just under two decades ago.

I am proud to say I know Andrew Bolt. I would not necessarily describe him as a friend, only because I do not know him that well. The vilification to which he has been subjected by the professional left in this country over the last two years and the use of the law to ban him from expressing his opinion has been unprecedented. It is unprecedented in Australia to ban people from expressing political opinions. I know Andrew, and he does not have a racist bone in his body. But those opposite who disagree seek to use the law to suppress his views.

More harm was done to the views of those who oppose racism by this case and the ruling by Justice Bromberg that a member of the victim group shall be the standard by which racism is measured.

While I have always opposed these laws, they were not on the public agenda until for the first time the court was going to ban the expression of opinion.

We were going to censor newspapers—and we did, because republication of Andrew Bolt's views was banned.

I was invited a couple of years ago to give a speech to the Executive Council of Australian Jewry on this point. I know Colin Rubenstein and Jeremy Jones. I know their work against racism is profound. I know they have done a lot of good work, but I respectfully disagree with them on these laws. I cannot recount all of my reasons in the time available today. But one is that in places where these laws exist, particularly in the old world of Europe where there are speech codes, there are things such as, for example, the armoured personnel carriers that I saw outside the new synagogue in Berlin just over a decade ago. They are the places with all the racial problems. It is the new world—such as Canada, which has recently repealed some of these laws, Australia, New Zealand and the United States—which has provided a home, refuge and sanctuary for people from all around the world. In particular, the communities that have been oppressed in those countries of Europe have often found refuge in the country with the freest speech on earth—and that is the United States.

I have faith in my fellow citizens that we will debate and come to the right resolution. Those opposite, sadly, do not. I do not know where it went.

That is a very powerful speech by our good friend Scott Ryan (Liberal Senator for Victoria). Many will agree.

I find much of what passes for leftist, 'progressive' thought to be Offensive.It offends my conscience.It offends and does damage to my 'Inalienable Rights'.But being a White, Anglo-Saxon, Heterosexual Male (with a smattering of Dane, Roman, Norman and Celt thrown around in 64ths) my being offended is treated with disdain, especially when a one 128th Aboriginal takes exception. And so too would Andrew Bolt, who was mentioned in the Senate, as he is regularly in Parliament.

I have had two articles banned after I mocked the re-tribalising of Australia - the absurd new “racial” divisions being forced on us. It is bizarre that arguments against racism are now being denounced as racist.

But today The Age runs an opinion piece arguing just that point - that resisting racial division is itself racist. This is Orwell meeting Kafka.

In it Waleed Aly argues against the Abbott Government’s proposal to reform the Racial Discrimination Act so comments are judged by the standards of the “ordinary reasonable member of the Australian community”:

And what race is this hypothetical “ordinary reasonable member of the Australian community” meant to be, exactly? If you answered that they have no particular race, then you’ve just given the whitest answer possible. It’s the answer that assumes there is such a thing as racial neutrality. Of course, only white people have the chance to be neutral because in our society only white is deemed normal; only whiteness is invisible.

I’m astonished. Aly is arguing that those of us who say we should have a colour-blind view of the “ordinary reasonable member of the Australian community” are actually racist, blind to anyone not white themselves.

We are “too white”, even if some of those holding this position are not white at all. Aly says we must instead see everyone not as individuals but representatives of some “race”.

To judge people by their “race” or “whiteness” is now the only way not to be racist.

Dead is the argument of Martin Luther King that we should believe “all men are brothers” and create “a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character”.

Did King give “the whitest answer possible” in dreaming of “racial neutrality”?

Aly’s argument also relies on an offensive stereotype that any judge, magistrate. human rights commissioner or jury member being asked to consider the views of the “ordinary reasonable member of the Australian community” is either white (and therefore blind to other “races") or simply racist, and unable to conceive of any “normal” construct of Australian identity which isn’t “white”. This is not only false, but arguably racist, assuming a lack of insight in whites that I suspect Aly credits in himself as a “non-white”.

Then there are the double standards and claims for race-based privileges in argument. Aly has been given jobs on the ABC, Channel 10 and Monash University, as well as book contracts and columns in The Age, yet is very good at telling “white people” whether they should or shouldn’t argue back:

As I said a while ago there is much about our world that offends to Heaven as well as here on Earth. There has never been a period in history where sanity was normal. Our current period emphasises stupidity, oppression by minorities, even minorities of one, and an overwheening narcissism. Ideology is set on such flimsy thinking as to tip all of us all too easily into evil.Much of it can simply be avoided. Or ignored. Some, like the stupidity of the Waleed Aly rubbish above is paid for from your and my taxes.Refuse to play the game. Do not be implicated.We can choose to avoid being offended by trivia. We must avoid being implicated in the offensive prohibitions that some might impose against our Inherent Rights. We MUST challenge and object to forcible agreement with Evil.Stupidity we just have to expect and put up with.It is enough to drive a chap to drink.So.... Drink Your Fill of Strength of Purpose. And raise a glass to the Andrew Bolts and the Mark Steyns of the world who go out on a limb for us..

Monday, March 24, 2014

Updated.It isn't often that big words can be spoken properly after a few pints in the Tavern's many bars. But at least they make sense. But just what sense can be made of the tsunami of hyperbole (or as ex-PM Juliar Gillard would say it, 'Hoiperbowl') that has infected even the supposedly intellectual Ivory Towers.The occasional exaggeration can be expected from almost any quarter, and anticipated with some timely chortles and guffaws. But when the exaggeration turns to howls and spittle and is designed to manipulate and intimidate, coerce and punish, the line has to be drawn and the mendacity exposed.

Take crime for instance. I mean really wicked crime that every civilised society today holds to be abhorrent. You would think it would be with some pride that we have a society where crime rates are tiny compared to one to two hundred years ago; Where vicious crime like say, rape, is universally condemned and everyone is in agreement that it is next to Murder on the list of 'worst'.Not so.

There is a continual media hype about the prevalence of rape, and rape 'victims' are the next best public performers to 12 year old girls on American Idol. And any talentless female can enter the game, announcing her candidacy with a pointed finger at some bloke. Mostly quite innocent.The rewards in revenge for personal slight, attention from peers, and financial 'compensation' from the taxpayer are huge.Apparently there is so much rape happening that some people (of similar leanings to the aformentioned ex PM) say, in all seriousness, that we have a Rape Culture: that in fact our society considers rape to be normal. Amongst men, that is, Of course.So, into the Pin and Balloon Bar came two fine ladies who were seething with indignation. They could see what so many of their educated peers refuse to see or at the least refuse to speak out about.

The 'Rape Culture'.

First to take a red hot pitchfork to the idea was Heather MacDonald. She outlined a part of the problem.

Heather can hold an audience for quite a long time, so just a bit of her account here.

It’s a lonely job, working the phones at a college rape crisis center. Day after day, you wait for the casualties to show up from the alleged campus rape epidemic—but no one calls. Could this mean that the crisis is overblown? No: it means, according to the campus sexual-assault industry, that the abuse of coeds is worse than anyone had ever imagined. It means that consultants and counselors need more funding to persuade student rape victims to break the silence of their suffering.

Wonderful phrase that: Break the silence.Everything that gets screamed about continually in the media seems to be 'silent'.

The campus rape movement highlights the current condition of radical feminism, from its self-indulgent bathos to its embrace of ever more vulnerable female victimhood.

But the movement is an even more important barometer of academia itself. In a delicious historical irony, the baby boomers who dismantled the university’s intellectual architecture in favor of unbridled sex and protest have now bureaucratized both.

While women’s studies professors bang pots and blow whistles at antirape rallies, in the dorm next door, freshman counselors and deans pass out tips for better orgasms and the use of sex toys.

The academic bureaucracy is roomy enough to sponsor both the dour antimale feminism of the college rape movement and the promiscuous hookup culture of student life. The only thing that doesn’t fit into the university’s new commitments is serious scholarly purpose.

The campus rape industry’s central tenet is that one-quarter of all college girls will be raped or be the targets of attempted rape by the end of their college years (completed rapes outnumbering attempted rapes by a ratio of about three to two).

The girls’ assailants are not terrifying strangers grabbing them in dark alleys but the guys sitting next to them in class or at the cafeteria.

This claim, first published in Ms. magazine in 1987, took the universities by storm. By the early 1990s, campus rape centers and 24-hour hotlines were opening across the country, aided by tens of millions of dollars of federal funding.

Victimhood rituals sprang up: first the Take Back the Night rallies, in which alleged rape victims reveal their stories to gathered crowds of candle-holding supporters; then the Clothesline Project, in which T-shirts made by self-proclaimed rape survivors are strung on campus, while recorded sounds of gongs and drums mark minute-by-minute casualties of the “rape culture.” A special rhetoric emerged: victims’ family and friends were “co-survivors”; “survivors” existed in a larger “community of survivors.”

Heather expounded a long history of how this hysteria spread. And the involvement of 'Authorities'.

As Heather points out, the incidents of rape on University Campuses is extremely low.As one might expect. But not as we are told.

Federal law requires colleges to publish reported crimes affecting their students. The numbers of reported sexual assaults—the law does not require their confirmation—usually run under half a dozen a year on private campuses and maybe two to three times that at large public universities.

You might think that having so few reports of sexual assault a year would be a point of pride; in fact, it’s a source of gall for students and administrators alike.

Certain rigidities MUST be adhered to in our strange new world. Heather says:

The scarcity of reported sexual assaults means that the women who do report them must be treated like rare treasures.

As Stuart Taylor and K. C. Johnson point out in their book Until Proven Innocent, however, the rate of false reports is at least 9 percent and probably closer to 50 percent. Just how powerful is the “believe unconditionally” credo?

And the hypocricy in even the reporting astounds a person of even average intellectual grasp. Heather mentions....

Strange Bedfellows at William and Mary

Anyone who still thinks of sorority girls as cashmere-clad innocents, giggling as they wait by the phone for that special someone to call, won’t understand much of the campus “date rape” scene. A few incidents at the College of William and Mary, a pioneer in sexual-assault awareness, may correct lingering misconceptions.

In October 2005, at a Delta Delta Delta formal, drunken sorority girls careened through the host’s house, vomiting, falling, and breaking furnishings. One girl ran naked through a hallway; another was found half-naked with a male on the bed in the master suite. A third had intercourse with her escort in a different bedroom. On the bus back from the formal, she was seen kissing her escort; once she arrived home, she had sex with a different male.

Later, she accused her escort of rape.

The district attorney declined to prosecute the girl’s rape charges. William and Mary, however, had already forced the defendant to leave school and, even after the D.A.’s decision, wouldn’t let him return until his accuser graduated. The defendant sued his accuser for $5.5 million for defamation; the parties settled out of court.

The incident wasn’t as unusual as it sounds. A year earlier, a William and Mary student had charged rape after having provided a condom to her partner for intercourse. The boy had cofounded the national antirape organization One in Four; the school suspended him for a year, anyway.

In an earlier incident, a drunken sorority girl was filmed giving oral sex to seven men.

She cried rape when her boyfriend found out.

William and Mary found one of the recipients, who had taped the event, guilty of assault and suspended him.

But in the fall semester of 2005, rape charges spread through William and Mary like witchcraft accusationsin a medieval village.

In short succession after the Delta Delta Delta bacchanal, three more students accused acquaintances of rape. Only one of these three additional victims pressed charges in court, however, and she quickly dropped the case.

﻿﻿

All that taxpayer funding has to be spent - on building the hysteria and breaking the 'silence'Duct Tape supplied by the Dept of Women's Studies.

A fifth rape incident around the same time followed a different pattern. In November 2005, a William and Mary student woke up in the middle of the night with a knife at her throat. A 23-year-old stranger with a prior conviction for peeping at her apartment complex had broken into her apartment; he raped her, threatened her roommate at knifepoint, and left with two stolen cell phones and cash. The rapist was caught, convicted, and sentenced to 57 years in prison.

Guess which incident got the most attention at William and Mary?

The Delta Delta Delta formal “rape.”

Like many stranger rapists on campus, the knifepoint assailant wasblack, and thus an unattractive target for politically correct protest. (The 2006 Duke stripper case, by contrast, seemingly provided the ideal and, for the industry, sadly rare configuration: white rapists and a black victim.)

Stranger rapes also provide less opportunity for bureaucratic expansion. After the spate of “date rapes,” William and Mary’s vice president for student affairs announced that the school would hire a full-time sexual-assault educator, in addition to its existing sexual-assault services and counseling staff and numerous sexual-assault awareness organizations. Freshmen would now have to attend a gender-specific sexual-assault awareness program.

None of this new apparatus—for instance, the “Equality Wheel,” which explains the “dynamics of a healthy relationship”—has the slightest relevance to stranger rapes.

However, the cross-currents of campus political correctness are so intense that they produce some surprising twists.

William and Mary’s sexual-assault resources webpage invites visitors to “listen to what people affected by sexual assault are sharing.” It then offers ten audio accounts of sexual assaults, exactly half of which are male. “My experience came very close to killing me,” one man reports.

One would need the skills of a Kremlinologist to interpret this gender lineup, and the site doesn’t explain who exactly these voices are—but it’s hard to escape the impression that William and Mary has admitted either a huge gay community or some very beefy women. Diversity politics, gay politics, and the sexual-assault movement produce strange bedfellows.

The further down the spiral of neuroticism one goes, the more bizzare the world appears. And we have to understand that beyond the hedges around the Tavern a very neurotic world flounders around.

Our dumbed-down society, with the universities actually Leader in Dumbing and employing the sour cream of the modern 'intelligensia' - the very same culpably blind sort that saw Communist Russia of the twenties and thirties as a 'splendid vision of progress' while ignoring the stench of the bodies, have ..

a certainty amid the normal moral uncertainties.

They decry 'absolutes' in the name of tolerance and diversity, while systematically coercing, intimidating and punishing anyone who still struggle with discriminating between 'good' and 'bad. Indeed Good, Bad, Truth and judging between them has been rendered almost criminal and in some cases pursued as though they were.In their place is the new certainty that only one world-view - the neurotic one - can be held.But some brave people still speak out, as Heather does. They can see.Barbara Kay in Canada is another and she too tackled this 'rape culture' cant.

Barbara Kay:

‘Rape culture’ fanatics don’t know what a culture is

In today’s edition of the Post, there is a very thoughtful and serious discussion of whether the phenomena of “rape culture” even exists. It will no doubt receive the usual stream of invective — accusations of trivializing rape, denying that sexual assaults occur, implying that women who drank too much deserved to be raped. Hardly real criticisms in any intellectual sense, but they will come.

These critics — that seems almost too kind a descriptor for them, but alas — don’t seem to understand that a denial of rape culture is not a denial that rape exists or an expression of indifference to the pain it causes its victims.

The world is imperfect. Bad or disturbed people commit crimes, including rape; good, well-adjusted people don’t.

My heart breaks for children killed by their guardians, and in a perfect world none ever would be, but even 100 children dead at the hands of their parents does not make Canada a child-killing culture, or anyone who’d say so a child-murder denier.

Indeed, the more closely one follows the increasingly hysterical volleys of rhetorical fire back and forth on this issue, the more apparent it becomes that those who speak of a rape culture don’t understand what the word “culture” actually means.

To result in a “culture,” a phenomenon must be widely accepted as the norm. It is culturally normal in some countries for women to be virtual chattels, governed by patriarchal standards of honour; to be married against their will; to meet blame from their kinsmen and indifference or even hostility at law enforcement and court levels when reporting sexual assault; to be shunned as unmarriageable — or worse — for the “shame” of having been raped, and so forth. There we can legitimately speak of a “rape culture.”

Here, where women are socially and legally equal to men, official sympathy for rape victims at every institutional level has created a climate so overwhelmingly sympathetic to female victims of sexual abuse that the emerging cultural danger is injustice to falsely alleged perpetrators.

We are gripped by a baseless, but pandemic, moral panic in which significant collateral damage is beginning to pile up.

Moral panic fuelled by ideology and righteous indignation quickly corrodes the critical faculties and blinds even otherwise intelligent people to objective facts.

The numbers on campus rape don’t even come close to the famous “one in four” [women on campus are victims of rape or attempted rape], even taking into consideration unreported rates (i.e. multiplying reported rapes by 10, or even 100).

Where did that figure come from anyway? From bowdlerized research.

I have spoken of this before, of course, as have several others in the bar from time to time. It bears repeating.

It began in 1982, when Mary Koss, then a professor of psychology at Kent State University in Ohio, published an article on rape in which she expressed the orthodox — and remarkably misandric – feminist theory that “rape represents an extreme behavior but one that is on a continuum with normal male behavior within the culture.”

Koss undertook a survey whereby she arrived at the one-in-four figure. To get there, Koss mischaracterized responses. For example, 73% of those she characterized as rape victims said they had not been raped. And 43% of the alleged victims said they had continued to date their alleged rapists.

Nevertheless, the one-in-four meme took hold. The survey was published in Ms Magazine in 1987 and “took the universities by storm,” producing what can rightly be termed

If you change “against her will” to “without her consent,” as we have, that is a huge paradigm shift from what we used to think of as rape: i.e. forced sex. And if a drunk woman can’t give her consent, another moved goalpost, she is ipso facto raped.

Last word to brilliant feminist (the kind I like) Camille Paglia:

“The feminist obsession with rape as a symbol of male-female relations is irrational and delusional. From the perspective of the future, this period in America will look like a reign of mass psychosis, like that of the Salem witch trials...

The fantastic fetishism of rape by mainstream … feminists has in the end trivialized rape, impugned women’s credibility, and reduced the sympathy we should feel for legitimate victims of violent sexual assault.”

There IS a 'Rape Culture'. It is carefully cultivated in the Godless 'Women's/gender Studies' Departments of Universities where young people's minds are systematically poisoned. It is paid for by taxpayers.**Update: 26/4/14BOB UNRUH stopped by to tell of a case in the USA where a lad was branded a rapist and sacked from college.

He is suing.It is all too easy for a woman to accuse a man of a crime of assault and even rape and find every support for herself and an automatic assumption of guilt for him. It HAS to be fought.

College facing trial for branding innocent student 'rapist'

A federal judge has ruled that a series of claims by a student-athlete against his school will go to trial after he was branded a rapist during a campus hearing even though a local prosecutor who investigated said the case should be dropped.

A ruling from U.S. District Judge Arthur Spiegel rejected the request by Xavier University to toss the entire case. It ordered a trial on claims by Dezmine Wells regarding breach of contract, intentional infliction of emotional distress, libel through injury to his personal reputation, his profession reputation

and with malice, negligence and discrimination.

The school released only a statement on the dispute.

“We’re pleased that the court dismissed a number of the claims at this point,” the university said. “The court’s decision was based solely on the facts as alleged by Mr. Wells and his lawyers in their amended complaint, as is required by court rules at this early stage in the litigation. After the actual facts are disclosed to the court, we are confident that the result will vindicate Xavier.”

Catherine Sevcenko, an attorney, commented on the website of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education that Wells was expelled for sexual assault “in spite of the local prosecutor’s public statements that the evidence did not support the accuser’s allegations.”

“The underlying theory of Wells’ case is that Xavier used him as a scapegoat to prove to the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) that it was cracking down on sexual assault claims after OCR investigated the university for violations of Title IX in 2012,” she said.

WND has reported several times on the federal campaign to have campus disciplinary boards determine guilt based on a preponderance of the evidence, which is far lower that the “beyond a reasonable doubt” in America’s criminal justice system.

A high-profile case that has been used to illustrate the problems created by the lower standard is the case of student Caleb Warner from the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks.

Warner was found guilty of sexual assault by a campus court in 2010, despite the facts established at the time by city police.

Officers not only refused to charge him in the case but also alleged his accuser made a false report.

Police issued a warrant for her arrest.

Even so, the university process found Warner guilty, and it took 18 months. During that time, Warner not only was banned from the UND campus but also from all college campuses in the state.

It is not surprising that fewer young men are going to University these days. Their reputation and future can be ruined by Kangaroo Courts stacked with feminists and feminist rhetoric. The Hyperbole is deliberate and Mendacious.Drink clarity. Drink Truth. Break the Silence.

Tuesday, March 18, 2014

The Tavern is as close to Life as any metaphor. Most of life itself is a metaphor. Life itself is real enough for the day to day, for most people, but from the perspective of Timelessness it affords us just a glimpse Reality. It has lessons for us.What a clever lot we are, surrounded and infused as we are by fools and crooks and narcissists. To make our way through it we need to be Captains of our craft and know the Rules. It is not as simple as your ABCs but even there is a metaphor.Rodrigo , who is based in Rio de Janiero, came over to show us a wider, higher, faster perspective. He is a Captain.

Rod is a favoured customer. He drops in with his wrap-around sunnies and his monk's tonsure, and his first-mate 'Thumbs'. He plies the skies in almost heavenly regions and you can rely upon him to know where he is going and how to get there.

He has instruments; a compass, gauges, things that measure and tell him - if he cares to look at them - how his trip is going. If it is safe. He MUST know how to use them. Just was we have to know how to use our senses and pay attention to them. Rod has to fly safely in fog and cloud with no reference points to see: in heavy weather. Above the clouds out of sight of landmarks. So do we in this age where the fog of 'relativity' can leave us in unknown territory.

He has to know the Rules not only of navigation and aviation but a thousand other rules that allow thousands of other Captains to ply the skies safely, getting their passengers to their destinations.

Just look around at our clever world. The parts that work do so to order. Rules. Not freedom-denying rules but freedom-enabling rules.

Our lives have Moral rules. We throw them out of the window at our peril.

You can book a ticket to fly. You 'invest' your money in a 'sound' airline that has strict rules for maintenance and safety, and pilots who are carefully selected and trained.

You would not fly with a Captain who disregarded the rules and announced over the intercom that 'he makes his own rules up as he goes along because he knows Better'.

You demand that he is skilled. You demand that he flies as intended. By the Rules. You demand that he uses all the instruments at his disposal. You demand that he knows and understands why things go wrong and how to fix that.

You do NOT want him being 'progressive'.

You do not want him to declare that the rules are 'old fashioned' or invented to oppress him. You do NOT want him to throw out all that has been learned and adopt his 'own' rules. And certainly not the ways used by airlines and pilots that have crashed and killed Millions of passengers.

Do you know how to fly?Your licences to fly CAN be cancelled.REPROBATE.

Bill Said:

The rampant immortality,
sin and debauchery we see everywhere around us can in part be explained by this
extremely frightening truth: things can get so bad that God actually hands
people over to their own sin and wickedness.

Religion & Peace

King Amfortas

About Me

The Knackered Old Knight, the wounded King. The Keeper-Emeritus of the Grail and now keeper of a Tavern.
I wore Black Armour, not white, although there were quite Kingly gold and silver bits. I still do.
But now I also have rolled-up sleeves and a towel.
I still keep the Faith.
Welcome to my Public House & Fine Dining. Here are to be found food for Soul and drink for the Spirit.
And some Roughage too.
I also contribute as an Author at the 'Nourishing Obscurity' blog;
and as a 'member' at Anti-misandry.com